50 Comments

If you say so. AT measured the changes since 331, which was a very long time ago, and they only found a 0-11% performance increase. Assuming the gains are real for this driver, and didn't come in any of the many in between, 11% is nothing to sneeze at, but it's not worthy of a "major event".Reply

Yes it would, but I think they should wait until summer. This will give AMD a chance to normalize their drivers, nail down some of the rendering quality issues (missing/different effects and particles), as well as allow NVIDIA to do more driver improvements like R337. Then I think it would be a nice comparison.Reply

The competition will be vs dx12. So we have can see a mature Mantle vs dx11, new dx12 all in one is what I would want. While a quick mantle vs dx11 would be nice (there's plenty of reviews out there ) it's more informative to compare current cards at $/perf then feature specifics in api. So I'd vote to hold off an in depth look until then. Reply

How do these driver perform with a more human monitor resolution? It is quite evident that if the GPU is at its limits no performance can be gained by reducing driver overhead (unless there is a SLI scaling problem like for TotalWar).What about a more wide spread 1080p resolution as in NVIDIA benchmark?Reply

The reason we don't have edit is simple: it's supposed to make you think before posting. We want our comments to rise above the common Internet forum quality, and we feel the lack of an edit button helps ensure posters take time to proof anything before posting. If we just let anyone go and edit previous posts, think of all the potential flame wars and name calling that could ensue...THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Okay, not really; I'm not sure why we haven't added it, other than to guarantee that what you see posted is what was always posted, so there's no retroactive editing. :-)Reply

If someone retroactively edits, people usually catch them. They are often mocked for it, too. The public shame often drives them to binge eating and the stains of doritas powder marks them physically as a retroactive editor of posts. Thus, more shame piles on.

Rinse, repeat.

When you see someone covered in dorita's dust, you know what happened. That's why it's an unspoken law you must treat them as Worf was treated after he was disowned by the whole Klingon Empire. You just cross your arms and turn your back to them.

Sure, they might stab you in the back and take your car keys or your iPhone, but at least you won't have acknowledged their existence.Reply

If you want to know when the nVidia driver (or even Mantle) will make a difference, all you have to do is ask yourself: "Is my CPU bottlenecking me?"

If so, yes. If not, not much improvement will be had. That's what makes Mantle being restricted to only GCN cards so absurd. The biggest gains Mantle has to offer are CPU improvements that could have been incorporated into OpenGL as extensions or, apparently, into DirectX drivers.

But AMD wants you to go buy a GCN card or one of their relatively new APU's, so they refuse to make it work on anything except GCN.Reply

I realize it's probably impractical to go back and re-bench everything in the Bench database when new drivers are released. But would it be possible to add a field indicating the driver revision that was running when the test result was achieved? Reply

They concentrated on 1080p as shown in their charts. Only 2% of users are running above this, that is why you didn't see much improvement. Why should they spend time on that when only 2% (according to steam hardware survey) use it? Test again with 1080p, otherwise these results aren't relevant. Nice info to know, but for 98% of us on 1920x1200 or below you're wasting our time.Reply

That happens on Windows 8.x when you have Hyper-V enabled. Disable Hyper-V or disable VT in your BIOS, and the drivers will work. nVidia is aware of the problem, and will probably fix that in the next beta release.Reply

Okay guys i am seeing a 5 fps increase on most games after this update (using an 660ti). Not only did the games speed up, but windows and in game frame-time has a HUGE benefit. The whole experience is bizarre and much smoother than before (im guessing this explains the new shader cache check box in Nvidia now). Anyway, just play around with your graphics card before updating and share what's up.Reply

I was excited about this update potentially giving across-the-board increases to gaming performance so I decided to install my trust old 3dmark06 and do a before and after test. What I found is that on my relatively old GTX 560 and with a very old benchmark I got an 8% increase in my 3dmark score! (On a 2500K OC to 4.4 ghz and RAM @ 1600)

I noticed D3:RoS framerate seemed way smoother and less spiky (mostly referring to downard spikes in FPS...but any variability can distract from gameplay) and HIGHLY recommend all nVidia ppl to get this update on the DOUBLE.Reply